Statutory Norms and Common Law Concepts in the Characterisation of Contracts for the Performance of Work
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While the relationship between statute and common law has attracted increased interest in the labour law field, limited attention has been directed at exploring this relationship in cases involving the characterisation of contracts for the performance of work. The characterisation of a work contract as an employment contract or an independent contract carries significant consequences in a number of different contexts, including tort law, employment law and taxation law. Many Australian statutes invoke the common law concept of employment as a criterion by which to confer rights and impose obligations. In determining whether a contract is one of employment and thereby covered by the relevant statute, Australian courts have not generally had regard to the purposes of the statute. However, in some Australian cases, it has been suggested that statutory purpose can, and should, guide the characterisation exercise. This article explores that suggestion, focusing particularly on statutes that confer rights and entitlements upon employees. In doing so, it draws upon decisions of the Supreme Courts of Canada and the United States that have adopted a 'purposive approach' to the employment concept. This article seeks to begin a conversation about the utility and viability of a purposive approach to the employment concept in Australia. It does so by canvassing the arguments in favour of a purposive approach and identifying some of the primary barriers to the adoption of such an approach by Australian courts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.093 | 0.103 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.118 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".